You know President Obama's State of the Union speech tonight will be all challenges and opportunities and hopes and dreams.

While presidents pontificate, mayors -- in their annual state of the village speeches at country clubs, chambers of commerce and public libraries -- well, they pontificate too.

But they...

I am the editor of Vital Speeches of the Day, a monthly magazine that collects the best speeches in the world. Many of its subscribers are speechwriters for CEOs and political leaders. Speechwriters usually complain about one of two things: Clients who won't work on the speech, and clients who...

State-of-the-town speeches exploded during the housing boom, when mayors could simply describe the explosive growth in the tax base and bask in the glow. After everything went to hell in 2008, most mayors would probably have preferred to skip the speech, but as that would have looked bad, they stood...

Which American demographic is most frustrated with President Obama at the moment?

Right-wing Republicans, who think he is a socialist?

Far-left Democrats, who say he is a sellout?

Nope.

Professional writers, who believed that Obama had been elected writer-in-chief, and that suddenly The White House was going to be...

On a happy visit last week to the Phoenix, Ariz. headquarters of the publisher of Vital Speeches of the Day -- I edit the magazine out of my home office in Chicago -- I saw the archives of the ancient publication for the first time. There wasn't a lot of...

Having escaped the confusions of childhood and emerged through the hot or cold war of your teenage years, you stride into the world feeling steeled against formative experience.

And then, into the blast furnace you go.

"A first job may be similar to one's experience with grade school," Larry Ragan...

Last week President Obama had the rhetorical luxury to talk grandly in his State of the Union Address, reminding Americans that "we do big things" and letting our imaginations take care of the rest.

But America's mayors, in their annual state of the village speeches at local libraries, chambers of...

It's been about a year since I took over what an observer once called the cushiest job in the world: editor of Vital Speeches of the Day, the 75-year-old monthly collection of the speeches.

"You go to the mailbox once a day, and it's filled with two things:...

If you're ever trying to contemplate the breakneck hell ride and joy ride of being gay in America over the last 70 years, get to know Jerry Pritikin, and look at the pictures he took along the way.

He was a teenager in Chicago in 1950s, when being gay was...

It's no accident that the relatively new trend of the splashy January state-of-the-village address was born and burgeoned during the housing boom. Back then--in the 1990s and 2000s, mayors wanted to get up and tout all the new housing starts and retail openings.

In those heady days, the state of...

I read with interest all the stories this week about the late Studs Terkel and his FBI file. To my dismay, they pretended to discover the ironic revelation that Terkel actually applied to work for the FBI in the early 1930s.

I scratched my head, waiting for someone to...

Next Saturday, Nov. 21, the Chicago Force women's football team is holding the first of two tryouts. "NO FOOTBALL EXPERIENCE NECESSARY! We are looking for dedicated, competitive athletes who want to play football."

I've got this intern working for me, he's a nice smart kid. (That's how bad things are for college grads these days. They intern for freelance writers.)

Anyway, the kid grew up in San Francisco. He moved here a few years ago to go to college at DePaul. The other...

My golf buddy Bill is having both hips replaced this fall, and all I can think of is one unforgettable day in the early spring of 2006.

It was cold and wet and cloudy and Bill and I were the only two people on the golf course. Our only company...

David Murray is editor of Vital Speeches of the Day.

Whenever one pundit frets about a loss of civility in the public dialogue, another cherry-picks some violent quotation from a long-ago political fight and says, "See? It was worse in 1840!"

So it was with particular interest that...

This essay was written in 2003; the opening scene took place in the summer of 2000. --DM

Terrible insults had been shouted as loud as we could shout, until our vocal chords gave out. I had thrown a burrito into the fireplace. The bedroom and guestroom doors had been slammed...

The in-flight magazines carry those "24 hours" pieces, suggesting you can get a flavor for Paris or London or Chicago in a day -- a tantalizing notion for just the type of imbecile who reads airline magazines.

But Ottawa, Ill. is not Hong Kong, and a few weeks ago...

Well, why wouldn't we rename Labor Day after Studs?

He wrote Working, which gave workers the dignity of their own eloquence, he defended workers his whole life and never stopped working himself until his death last fall at 96.

He also narrated this film, "Can't Take No...

Toward the end of last week the Chicago Tribune ran a couple of stories on Bolingbrook--one on its politically profligate mayor Roger Claar and the other on Claar's massive, money-losing municipal golf course and adjacent stalled housing development.

It just hit me that it's two years this month since my friend Ed Reardon died. A lot has changed since then. I haven't smoked since the day of his wake, which would please Eddie; but I've been working out a lot, which would deepen his suspicion that I'm...